As someone mired in enterprise web application development in the early oughts, I can tell you this is kind of backwards. ActiveRecord was actually a simplification of the more complex ORM that enterprise software (mostly in Java at the time, but a little bit of Objective C in the banking realm) was using. I _think_ the term "ActiveRecord" was first used in the 2003 book Patterns of Enterprise Architecture, and it was described as a pattern you could use when you didn't need the complexity of a full-blown ORM. For people who had wrestled with Hibernate or WebObjects, ActiveRecord felt like a light-weight sigh of relief.

That said - even as someone who still works on RoR apps - I'm glad we've mostly moved beyond ORMs (primarily by moving beyond objects, which were never a very good fit for representing data in the first place).